Cheap Graphics Card to run multiple displays

[Ian Feldmann]

Hi, for a school project I am creating a wall of four monitors sitting next to each other, all VGA. What I need is a/multiple graphics cards that can run videos and pictures for displaying my classes work. I am on a very tight budget because this is a school project. I might also be getting a new mobo so that I can fit 2 PCI-E cards

 

[giantbucket]

all vga outputs? no idea.
if you can do vga, dvi, dvi, hdmi - the an Asus GT640-2GD3 is your card. it'll run 4 screens.

 

[Dunlop0078]

What is your budget? GTX 750 ti would be a good choice but your going to need adapters to run vga monitors on it.

 

[Wisecracker]

At what resolutions?

An AMD A10-5800K APU will push 3 monitors BUT in your case you will be limited to 2 --- the d-sub and a DVI-I (with a d-sub adapter).

A 750ti will likely not work for you. There are a half-dozen or so cards with a d-sub, but you will have to verify a DVI-I (for another d-sub adapter) port.

Most are likely DVI-D, which will not convert to an analog signal.

Here are 3 2x d-sub output cards.


edit: Forgot link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=48&N=100007709%20600007856%20600374078%20600007855%20600528885%20600007852%20600374079%20600286742%20600007854%20600374080%20600007831&IsNodeId=1&IsPowerSearch=1

 

[Suferbus]

Hi, for a school project I am creating a wall of four monitors sitting next to each other, all VGA. What I need is a/multiple graphics cards that can run videos and pictures for displaying my classes work. I am on a very tight budget because this is a school project. I might also be getting a new mobo so that I can fit 2 PCI-E cards

Ian, what is your goal with the 4 monitors? Do you want to be able to span your desktop across all four, or just run each monitor as four separate monitors? The reason I ask is because it takes a lot less of a gpu to run 4 separate monitors at once, i.e. pretty much any graphics card on the market either with an adapter to run 4 monitors, or with the adapters on the gpu itself. If you want to have the option to power the four monitors as a 'spanned' display, you will need vram more than anything, especially if you ever want to play a game. 2gb of vram can get the job done, but will not be very successful at playing many games on high settings, so honestly with your budget, I would go AMD R9 290, single card, no need for the 290x. You can currently get an R9 290 sub 200.00. Let me know how you plan to use the monitors and we will go from there. By the way, getting more than 1 graphics card will not help you as far as running multiple monitors, i.e. getting 2 or 3 cheaper 1 or 2 gb versions and running in sli will still cause issues because VRAM does not stack, and VRAM is exactly what you need to power that many monitors in eyefinity or surround mode.

 

[Ian Feldmann]

So my goal is to have each display with separate items being displayed, some pics, some videos. I have 4 USB 3.0 VGA USB Adapters and also DVI to VGA Adapters. But currently the PC I am running off of is old so it doesnt even have USB 3.0 or connection ports on the mobo for the headers. I do not need to do surround or SLI but just need the cards to smoothly run videos and slideshows. I believe that the displays are only 1280*1024 so pretty bad resolution but I need to run all four at once.
BTW, my budget is very small, I cant afford something like the R9 290, Amazon says its $400, any other suggestions

 

[Ian Feldmann]

Also, I already have a gtx 8400GS 1GB card but cannot connect it yet because the mobo only has PCI connectors, not PCI-E. Oh yeah, does anyone know what it means when a PCI port says ADD2 support only??

 

[Wisecracker]

AMD Athlon 5350 Kabini : $56 with code COUPNLGYEX215

MSI HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Motherboard : $32

There are 2 video ports on the mobo you may use (D-Sub and DVI-D) -- Not to mention the 2xUSB3 ports on the back panel. The 8400GS will run in the PCIe slot on the motherboard.

I think ADD2 is some type of specialized Intel video concoction.

 

[pc god]

plenty of budget cards out there for this job ie the amd radeon hd5450 has 3 display ports vga hdmi and dvi and does support 3 displays at once these cards are low profile cards that are silent cooled (no fan) and are only around 20 quid on amazon and ebay to run 4 displays all on vga these days you would be struglling but if you have 4 pci not not pci express then windows xp supports multi adapter displays then thats 4 old vga cards all around 2 quid each these days off ebay however if you want to run 4 displays at once may i suggest a spliter of course this option means every display is a duplicate so all will have same thing on them spliters for vga are old tech so im sure you can pick these up cheap nowadays vga is actually harder to work with than hdmi because of its limited capabilities and bulky plugs so choice is yours buy a cheap new graphics or buy 4 old vga cards on windows xp or use a spliter for duplicate displays happy computing.